With only a small team serving hundreds of thousands of customers across eight European markets, Helloprint are constantly looking for ways to improve efficiency. Recently, the brand turned to Google Ads* Smart Bidding, Ad Customisers, Dynamic Search Ads and Smart Display to automate key elements of their campaigns.
Helloprint was founded in 2013 with a dream of making printing easier for everyone, everywhere. At the heart of the company’s culture is an embrace of new technology, agile organisation, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the often complex task of printing fast and simple.
Offline Products, Online Customers
Although Helloprint’s products belong to the offline, physical world, the brand has always acknowledged the importance of digital. “We believe that online advertising is crucial to our company,” says Sanne van Breemen, Team Lead PPC. “As our product portfolio has grown recently, we’ve been looking for smarter ways to connect with our customers in a scalable and personalised manner.”
“As our product portfolio has grown recently, we’ve been looking for smarter ways to connect with our customers in a scalable and personalised manner.”
- Sanne van Breemen, Team Lead PPC, Helloprint
Automation and Personalisation at Scale
With several projects underway to improve the efficiency of the brand’s marketing, the PPC team began focusing on bringing increased automation and data awareness to their workflow. “We started by looking at Smart Bidding,” explains Nick Mahn, PPC Manager at Helloprint. “Although we were skeptical at first, after running an AB test that showed much better results compared to manual bidding, we became convinced.” With the efficacy of Smart Bidding demonstrated, Nick and the team were able to free up time to begin exploring other opportunities to improve performance.
Next on the agenda was ad personalisation, using Location Insertion and Ad Customisers to make Helloprint’s ad text as relevant and up-to-date as possible. Additionally, the team implemented Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) using Page Feeds, allowing them to rapidly launch 1500 new products across 8 markets, with dynamic pricing updating several times per day. “We were surprised at how well the search queries matched to our pages,” Nick says of their initial experience with DSA. On the Display side, Helloprint also implemented a fully automated Smart Display campaign, taking advantage of the format’s ability to drive incremental conversions at a target cost per acquisition.
Building a Super-Effective Marketing Organisation
By implementing Enhanced Cost Per Click and Target Cost Per Acquisition with Smart Bidding, Helloprint doubled their conversions at a CPA 53% lower than before. Smart Display also produced impressive returns, with every last-click conversion driven by the campaign matched by another ten view-through conversions. In fact, this campaign represented Helloprint’s first ROI-positive display campaign, adding a valuable new channel for communicating with the brand’s customers.
In addition to these improvements in commercial performance, the efficiency gains allowed Helloprint’s PPC team to collaborate with the Business Intelligence group on a new Lifetime Value model that is expected to drive significant incremental growth in the future. “We’re very excited about building a fully automated, super-effective marketing organisation,” says Sanne van Breemen, summing up the next steps for Helloprint. “We want to be able to understand the full digital journey of the customer, then create tailor-made advertisements and product offerings that match their needs and desires. Automation will allow us to do that scalably across all the countries we’re active in.”